Paul Ryan, the Hype Man No More, Looks Out at a Campaign Not His Own & Sees a Twinkle of 2016

DERRY, N.H. — Spending a day up in New Hampshire is often a matter of a visit to the psychic time-warp, but very rarely do you go forward in time. On Saturday, the very old and very white Republican Party of New Hampshire assembled at Pinkerton Academy, a neat little wreath of buildings at the top of a hill here. And with New Hampshire still considered a "swing state" in the election this year, the local party convention naturally brought to town a couple of national superstars. By an odd circumstance, they both were from Wisconsin. The Zombie-Eyed Granny-Starver and the Goggle-Eyed Homunculus, together at last, in the same place, and almost at the same time. It was like The Avengers. Actually, it was more like Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle For Earth, but, really, it looked a lot like 2016 up here in New Hampshire this weekend.

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Paul Ryan went first, arriving in the Pinkerton gymnasium on a dark, wet morning at the ungodly political hour of 9:30 a.m. It was the first time I'd seen his live show since that howling pack of barefaced non-facts he offered the country down in Tampa. As I recall, Ryan was supposed to bring both "intellect" and "energy" to a ticket headed by Willard Romney, the International Harvester. This is a long pull up a dirt road all on its own, and, while I will continue to let Professor Krugman handle the "intellect" part of the equation, I can tell you that, if this appearance is any indication, Ryan has brought to the campaign all the political energy of Franklin Pierce, and he's been dead and buried not far from here for almost 150 years. This was a slack-assed crowd come to see a guy who's pretty plainly both a) playing out the string, and b) trying very hard to be a viable political figure going forward. In short, and to paraphrase Dave Edmunds, Paul Ryan is crawling from the wreckage and the thing hasn't even crashed yet.

Not even his AC/DC intro music got them charged up — to be fair, his elderly audience was as dead as Bon Scott — and the theme for the morning seemed to be "leadership." He and Romney have it. The president does not. There was the usual Ryan boilerplate about the election's being a choice of "what kind of country we are going to be, and what kind of people we are" and whether we will continue with the president's policies that, according to Ryan, "foster dependency," which is not, presumably, the kind of dependency the government fostered on young Paul Ryan, when he used his Social Security survivor's benefits to get through high school and college. Once again, as always, you're welcome, dude.

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(Note: I will stop bringing this up as an issue just as soon as somebody with more clout than I have actually, you know, brings it up as an issue.)

"This is the time," Ryan said, "for decisive, principled leadership," and, damn me if you couldn't hear half of even this crowd thinking,

Decisive, principled leadership?

Willard Romney?

Pull the other one, Paul.

But he couldn't move them to anything more than politely enthusiastic applause. This, I thought, right here, this is what a campaign looks like when the air's gone out of it. If you buy the arrant bullshit he's selling, Ryan is an engaging public presence, but here you could see that not only has he become a little tired of his job as a Romney frontman, but also that he's not getting back from his audience enough of a charge to keep him fired up. This was one appearance early in the morning on a rainy day, but if this is the best the Republicans can do to fire themselves up behind their candidates, the ticket is slowly sinking to the bottom of the mire.

(Let me also note that, if the ticket craters, Ryan is uniquely suited to walk away with his reputation intact — unless, of course, Rob Zerban beats him for his House seat, and I don't think Jeebus is enough of my amigo to allow that to happen. He's still got a remarkable percentage of the Beltway media fooled into thinking he's a genius, and he will be a genuine power in whatever budget deals get cut in the lame-duck session. Democratic whip Steny Hoyer already is talking about how they can work together once all this fuss and bother is over. Undoubtedly, this is why Ryan and his people, and his cheering section in the media, all have been regularly been vocal about how Romney is wasting his talents. Young granny-starver has a lean and hungry look.)

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By contrast, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was the keynoter at the state convention later that same afternoon, and he managed to bring a crowd of largely the same people to their feet when he talked about how he'd managed to fend off the giant mountain trolls unleashed by the labor unions with only his own plucky spirit and the help of all the little people whose names are not, say, Koch.

"And we came through all the hate and the attack ads from the national interest groups, and we won our recall by a bigger margin than we we got when we won our election," he said, and the crowd came cheering to its feet, albeit a bit slowly. They cheered again when Walker told an astonishingly truth-free tale about how the president wanted to keep unemployment high so as to keep as many people as possible on "government" benefits. He followed that up with an equally apocryphal tale about some bureaucrat in Wisconsin who'd told Walker that "your predecessor measured his success by how many people he got signed up for unemployment." Now, I don't believe this latter story as far as I can throw the Pabst Theater, but the crowd ate it up and asked for seconds. And that's when I realized that both Walker and Ryan were here, not only to thump the tub for their embattled nominee but also because, Christ save us, it is time for people to start thinking about running for president four years from now and, at the moment, and assuming that the John Doe investigation into Walker's conduct while serving as Milwaukee country executive there doesn't immolate him, and assuming that Rob Zerban doesn't knock some water out of a stone, it looks as though the first round may well be a rumble in America's Dairyland. More to the point, the people at the convention seemed also to be looking fondly at a more distant future, and at the better shot they think they'll have at an White House without an incumbent. Of course, Willard Romney could be president in 2016, too, and all bets would be off. Two cheers for that, say the Republicans of New Hampshire.

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